Re: [Fed-Talk] Revised: A Year in the Life of using MS Office 2008 for Mac (entourage addition)
Re: [Fed-Talk] Revised: A Year in the Life of using MS Office 2008 for Mac (entourage addition)
- Subject: Re: [Fed-Talk] Revised: A Year in the Life of using MS Office 2008 for Mac (entourage addition)
- From: Boyd Fletcher <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:48:33 -0400
i agree they are not gone, but they appear to be much better than
Office 2004. I have a three 20GB mail stores and only have had to
rebuild the store twice in a year in a half and in both cases it was
due to multiple improper shutdowns of Entourage (i.e. hard reboot of
the mac because it locked up).
i wish we could encrypt the stores.
boyd
On Apr 28, 2009, at 5:12 AM, Wm. Cerniuk wrote:
I would add that Entourage's problems with database corruption are
not gone. The problem is just pushed out beyond the common capacity
limits of most users.
We have seen multiple occasions where database corruption has
occured in the last 2 months. These databases vary in size from 12
to 17GB yet the mail that they supposedly store is no where near
that size.
Recovering one of these monster files is very time consuming (hours)
and in some cases, as in a 60GB MacBook Air SSD drive, impossible
without moving back and forth external disk.
After recovery, and after an attempt to optimize the db, the db
files are not significantly smaller.
I have not had time to dive into this to determine the root cause.
If anyone has seen similar, please email me off list.
But the short answer, Entourage is no saint but it does seem more
stable than Outlook ;-)
V/R,
Wm. Cerniuk
(Sent faster from my iPhone 3G)
On Apr 27, 2009, at 11:12 PM, Boyd Fletcher
<email@hidden> wrote:
This is an update to the email I sent back in February. Microsoft
didn't have the courtesy to respond to the last email and the idea
that I have to pay MS to report bugs to MS is an absolute
absurdity. So....
After using MS Office 2008 Enterprise edition daily for over the
last year, I thought it might be interesting to report on what
works well and what doesn't. Hopefully MS can address the
deficiencies mentioned - but its looking less and less likely that
they care about making a quality and reliable product people can
trust.
The good things:
1. Entourage 2008 with CAC authentication for OWA is awesome! works
great and supports CAC authentication to multiple OWA sites
concurrently
2. Entourage is very solid. very seldom crashes and the database
repair problems that frequented entourage 2004 seem to be mostly gone
3. Word and Powerpoint are considerably faster than their 2004
versions especially with graphics.
4. MyDay is very helpful. nice addition
The bad things:
1. Entourage 2008 does not support searching of the GAL via OWA.
Users must download the free 3rd party app "OWA GAL Search". This
shouldn't be necessary.
2. MS Word is very unstable on large (100+ page word documents)
using the .doc file format. it can be easily crashed if a user
uses page up/page down or scroll bar to rapidly scroll through the
document. It appears to be worse if track changes are on and show
comments/insert&deletes are being displayed. words crashes at least
a couple times a day. I have sent hundreds of crash dumps to MS
because of this.
3. All toolbars should be dockable/undockable. This is a common
UI capability. Mac Office's inconsistent use of dockable toolbars
in frustrating to users - especially those coming from MS Windows.
I've never seen any mainstream application which such a bizarre
approach to mixing dockable and undockable toolbars.
4. Excel's lack of ability to dock the formula bar drives heavy
Excel users bonkers. I've seen a number of folks switch to Apple's
apps and Neo/Open Office because of this issue
5. on Tiger, there is still a severe bug in PowerPoint that causes
some drawings not to print correctly to PDF. This bug is silently
ignored in Preview but not in Adobe Reader (on all platforms).
Office 2004 PPT does not have this problem
6. there is a bizarre problem, with wrapping lines within PPT
slides specially related to use of "/" at the end of line.
Problems does not occur with 2004 and seems to happen with new
slides. If the slide was created in Office 2003/2004 it works fine
(most of the time)
7. indentation behavior with bullets is not consistent with office
2003/2004. Extra space is added lines after the first
8. Entourage makes some security assumptions about certain file
extensions and blocks them from being accessed. there does not
appear to be a way to turn this off or change the list.
9. the default paragraph spacing (pt) for after is set to 10 by
default. its very very frustrating to users to have to reset this
to a more reasonable value. Word 2004 used 0
10. you can’t set the theme for non .docx files, so if you save
to .doc and you didn’t select the theme (i.e. default fonts) you
must change the doc to .docx before you can access the theme again
and change the default fonts. there should be a way to change
directly the default fonts while using .doc files.
11. Having a “hide” ability for MyDay was a very commonly requested
feature. it could work how the Dock works when hidden.
12. MyDay, if it is set to show in Menu Bar, does not show up in
ALT-TAB nor does it show up in “Force Quit” which is bad. Apps
should always show in “Force Quit”
13. Word and Powerpoint – the default style should use Times Roman
not Calibri (ppt) or Cambria (word) as the default font for
documents. This is causing big training and support issues as
Calibri/Cambria are not standard fonts.
14. Icons that consist of picture and word below, only the picture
is clickable. this is incorrect behavior as the words should also
be clickable. For example in Entrourage message create window the
Priority, Signature, and Security buttons the word beneath the icon
is not clickable. the problem does not occur in all place in all
apps.
15. the elements gallery is nice but not used as much as the
developer may have thought and users should be able to remove it
(undock it) from being displayed.
16. lack of ODF import/export support is problematic when
communicating with academia and foreign partners using OpenOffice.
17. "Recent Addresses" behavior when using compose message will not
let you delete specific recent addresses like you can on Outlook
2003. You can either clear the entire list or live with bad entries
in the list.
18. You can't r/w Windows Outlook PST files on Mac.
19. You can't encrypt your email store in Entourage. Yes I could
use FileVault but FV is buggy and still not in my opinion ready for
production use.
20. MS Powerpoint has very serious compatibility problems with
older .ppt. It frequently renders and edits bullets wrong and I
have to revert back to Office 2004
21. MS Word has serious cut and paste problems from other word
documents. For example, it will frequently grab non-selected theme
data (like background images) when copying on small amounts of
selected text. Office 2003/2004 don't have this behavior.
22. Adding encryption certificates for a sender says it works but
it never adds the certificate to the list
23. there is no way to clear individual names from the "Recent
Addresses" features. Outlook can do this but with Entourage its and
all or nothing clear.
My Conclusions:
1. MS Word 2008 should not be used to edit .doc of more than 10-20
pages with heavily use of track changes. Its simply not stable and
crashes very frequently.
2. MS PowerPoint 2008 can not be used to edit .ppt file
reliability. There are serious bugs in bullet rendering and edit
code - which the most heavily used feature in PPT.
3. Entourage is relatively safe and stable to be used. With its CAC
auth support it is better than Entourage 2004, but lack of
encrypted data stores can be problem. Add its unreliable behavior
with add people's certs for encrypting mail to then makes it use in
DOD problematic.
4. Excel's poor GUI decision make its use very frustrating to heavy
excel users.
So...if you don't need Entourage 2008's CAC auth capabilities or
OOXML file formats then you are probably far better off using
Office 2004.
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